Guys I am fortunate enough to have fallen in with a great group of hackers that want to play in this upcoming weekends Defcon CTF.

O.K. we are being realistic and understand that we will not make the finals. Were doing it for kicks and grins and to just try to make a few points. We all understand this is a learning experience. If we all have fun together we will do more CTF's this year and get ready to really try for next years DefCon.

We do have some very very good hackers involved and its a great arena for practicing everything we are learning here. (really they are much better than me, but i get a chance to learn allot)

I would also be very keen in a nullbyte CTF, I could probably even contribute a flag perhaps. Unfortunately though I won't be able to make the defcon one as I'm also stupid busy. We should really get the IRC channel back up and active, as there is starting to become quite a few active contributors around here lately, which is very good to see.

Ha ha, nah. I'm moving from Sydney, Australia to Glasgow, Scotland. Just trying to sort out my Portuguese citizenship first; but I should be moving about the end of this month or sometime in June.

Terrifying to be honest.

And then next year I'll be starting study in a Digital Security, Forensics, and Ethical Hacking Masters Degree. I was thinking of starting a 4 year long series of threads detailing my entire 'journey' so to speak. I'm so very excited though and OTW's articles are helping me immensely.

EDIT: As a side note; I agree, we should get that IRC channel up and running again.

Wow, well done. Maybe we will meet again professionally some time hahahahaha.

Should of jumped the ditch, us Kiwis are an amazing bunch of people.

I moved to Brisbane from NZ (back in nz now) when I was 18 with no support network, I understand how out of depth you can feel. But you'll be fine, an even better chance to hone those SE skills, as you'll find they can be used for more than just pentesting

I was thinking of heading to NZ for a little while, but then I have my missus in Scotland so she wins. I actually found out that the Commonwealth Games are being held in Glasgow very soon so I couldn't have planned it better if I tried, should be relatively easy to get an initial job and then work from there. Still a terrifying prospect but I at least have a very nice nest egg to work with.

I am not actually playing for wonderHowTo in this event. As I said I just got very fortunate in falling in with a group of already skilled hackers. I told them that I am really just trying to firm up my position of an intermediate skill hacker, but they are just wanting to have fun with this so invited me along. (and really do you think I would of said no!!!), I suspect my job will be as a gofer and log reader in the event. They don't mind taking in interested motivated players that want to grow and learn with the group. (please see intermediate skills in hacking).

DefCon is like the super-bowl of hacker ctf so we have little illusions of qualifying in fact we will be happy with just making a single point. The purpose of competing is to get our feet wet, gain some experience in the event and hopefully play in some attack and defense games during the year. Then make a real stab at defcon next year.

I will be happy to post what I learn as we move along in the events. You can follow our team here.

Well you all asked for updates as we move along with the team. As to be expected we found we had a troll in our midst. There was a little drama as we had to get him kicked of the team. We are up to 10 players for the event (which is way more than i expected).

thanks owt, it was a router log in, one of those trick ones, you think they are gonna have to be rainbowed brute forced, but it was a simple user "leave blank" pw "admin" that got us in, then we had to break apart the code which showed us the flag

Our lack of experience is slowing us down at the moment. We are having to write scripts that I am sure others teams have already had in their arsenal for this event. One is a script for tic tac toe. which is the challenge "baby first one"

Also a raw socket prompt cracker

The scripts are running and we should be getting some results shortly,